Crackdown in Xinjiang: China and the Islamic World’s Achille Heel

A disagreement between major Indonesian religious leaders and the government on how to respond to China’s crackdown on Turkic Muslims raises questions about the Islamic World’s ability to sustain its silence about what amounts to one of the most concerted assaults on the faith in recent history.

The disagreement could take on greater significance after elections in April next year which incumbent President Joko Widodo is expected to win. Mr. Widodo’s vice-presidential running mate, Ma’ruf Amin, is the Ulema Council’s chairman. Since joining the presidential ticket, Mr. Amin has retained his council position as non-active chairman.

In a similar vein, Mushahid Hussain, chairman of Pakistan’s Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, said the cardinal principle of Pakistan-China relations was to refrain from commenting on anything to do with another other country’s domestic issues even though some 200 small Pakistani businessmen have been campaigning for the release of their Uyghur spouses from Chinese camps and either the lifting of travel bans on their children or being allowed to visit them.

“Given the relationship of Pakistan with China, and in the Muslim world, in particular, the Chinese narrative is apparently being accepted across the board as the one that is correct,” Mr. Hussain told the Associated Press.

Nabeel Shariff, the founder of UK-based halal holiday company Serendipity Tailormade, struggled with the ethical aspects of promoting Muslim tourism to China, but concluded that “In a way, it makes sure the Uygur community are not forgotten.”

Mr. Shariff’s justification notwithstanding, there is little public evidence of the plight of China’s Turkic Muslims being in the Muslim public eye. Muslim and Chinese leaders appear to be betting that the silence is sustainable. That threatens to be a risky strategy.

For one, the crackdown in Xinjiang is expanding to the Hui, China’s non-Turkic Muslims. The autonomous region of Ningxia Hui recently signed a cooperation agreement on anti-terrorism with Xinjiang in a bid to learn from the crackdown on the Turkic Muslims or in the words of the Global Times, a Communist Party organ, “to learn from Xinjiang’s experiences in promoting social stability.”

Mounting Western criticism of the crackdown, that is toughest on Muslims, but also targets other religious groups, including evangelists, puts Muslim nations on the spot. The criticism is likely to lead to Western companies boycotting products made in Xinjiang by inmates of the re-education camps, which China describes as institutions for vocational training, or people who were recently released but forced to work in factories associated with the crackdown.

An Associated Press investigation published this week tracked the shipment of sportswear from a factory linked to the camps to Badger Sportswear in the United States that supplies university bookshops and sports teams around the country. “We will voluntarily halt sourcing and will move production elsewhere while we investigate the matters raised,” said Badger CEO John Anton.

A potential black swan is anti-Chinese sentiment in a number of Muslim countries, some of which have ethnic links to China’s Turkic Muslims, as a result of perceptions of Chinese commercial terms for project finance and loans associated with the People’s Republic’s infrastructure-driven Belt and Road initiative that are perceived to be debt traps.

In an illustration of the risk, Kunaysh Sultanov, a member of the Kazakh parliament and former deputy prime minister and ambassador to China, took issue with the government’s walking a tight rope, attempting to balance its relations with its need to stand up for the rights of Kazaks.

“There should be talks taking place with the Chinese delegates. Every delegation that goes there should be bringing this topic up…The key issue is that of the human rights of ethnic Kazakhs in any country of the world being respected,” Mr. Sultanov said after a Chinese camp worker of Kazakh descent who had escaped to the Central Asian republic testified in court about what she had witnessed.